(SOP) How We Made 250K In 24 Hours (Withouts Ads)

Here’s how we made 250K in 24 hours with one of our brands (without running a single ad)...

Let me start by saying...

we've replicated this same playbook so many times with similar results - it still works! 💪

A bit of background first...

In 2020 I interviewed a founder of a boutique kids clothing company on my podcast Secrets To Scaling Your E-commerce Brand who told me that her number 1 secret to success was her Facebook group! 📈

Intrigued, I asked her more...

She said that with a Facebook group of 3000 members, she was able to sell out entire collections before she even released them. 🤯

I knew that there was something special, so I went about trying to replicate building a community around our Baby Brand Little & Lively. 👶

It was hard work, and at first, I didn't really know how we were going to get people to join the group - l

et alone what we were going to talk about to keep them engaged... 😅

But then something amazing happened -

the group started to grow on its own from people inviting their friends and another strategy that we implemented... 🎉

Here's how it worked:

After a customer made their first purchase, we sent them a personalized video (oh man AI would have been amazing for this) thanking them for their purchase and inviting them into the group to join other parents who loved our brand. 🎥

We followed up with an SMS link to the community a few days later. 📲

Every week we welcomed hundreds of new members into the community publicly and asked people to invite their friends. 👋

Before we knew it, the group had grown to over 10K members, and we knew that we had something special on our hands. 💥

We realized that we had cracked the power of community. 💡

Now... a lot of brands out there say that they have a community...

But my definition of community is a little different.

A community is a place where your customers can TALK TO EACH OTHER 🗣️

It's a one-on-one place. 🤝

There is very little censorship. 🚫

It's a place where your customers can get advice from people who love your brand who aren't you! ❤️

THIS IS WHERE THE MAGIC OF COMMUNITY HAPPENS! ✨

Now...

How we leveraged this community to make 250K in 24 hours:

Up until this point, we had mostly used the group to get feedback on new designs and TBH we were using it more like another broadcast channel (don't make this mistake when you build a community) 🚫.

But then I had an idea 💡...

Why don't we give them early access? 👀

But how? 🤔

Some background about this launch first:

1️⃣ We were releasing our Fall/Winter collection to our retail customers.

2️⃣ The biggest launch day that we had prior to this launch was $60K.

3️⃣ We had invested a lot in this collection and needed to generate some cash ASAP! 💸

At the time, I had been reading the book "Contagious" by Jonah Berger, and he had talked about how a fast fashion brand that was failing had repositioned itself as exclusive by password-protecting its site and launching new collections once a week...

AND THAT'S WHEN IT DAWNED ON ME! 💡✨

We decided to test the gated launch method 🗝️.

So how did it work?

1️⃣ We would lock down the entire site for 12 hours before the launch and password-protect it before our big launch.

2️⃣ We teased the product drop for 2 weeks before the launch on email, SMS, and within our VIP group...

3️⃣ But the key was what we told our customers:

a. We are probably going to sell out of some of the most popular sizes and prints early ⏳

b. The only way to get early access to order was going to be by getting a password that would only be dropped within our VIP group 🔑

4️⃣ We built the FOMO and the anticipation within the group by releasing another sneak peek of what we were going to launch at 10 AM every day 🔥.

I was so nervous the day that we launched...

I turned on the Shopify dashboard at 9:59 , and there were already 700 visitors on the site - waiting for the password 😱.

At 10 AM, we released the password on the VIP group 🔓.

I held my breath thinking...

"What if this doesn't work?" "What if they can't get into the site?" 😰

But before I could think too long, I saw the first order come through... and then the second and then the third! 🚀💥

There were over 3K visitors on the site at this point, and people were panicking!! 😵‍💫

We had the site locked down for 2 hours and within those two hours, we made over $120K in sales! 💵💸

At 12 PM, we opened the site to the general public and within the next 22 hours, we did another $130K in sales. 🤑

This was not a one-off experience - we rinsed and repeated many times! ♻️

Want to try it? 🤔

Here’s a link to the SOP (ungated of course hahaha)

Also… if you want an agency who works on strategies like this working for you - book a call with my team here